Nothing came here in its numbers

There is nothing to eat.
Nothing grows here since the tractors, earth movers and
concrete trucks came and left.
There where they built a make-shift school nothing is taught.
And the computer room with the biometric identity tags
have had nothing on their monitors for months.
Nothing is said any longer about the tourists and business-men that would ride
into town on the highway that was never built.
I once heard the big man who sits in the governors offices
swear he knew nothing about where all the money for the developments
had gone.
And there was nothing to be done when the annual flooding
that brought diseased dysentery and diarrhea
took the little boys who played in the rain and raced paper boats in the drains.
Nothing had been done to prepare the dwellings for the drawn-out winter,
and nothing would remain, when sleep knocked over the gas lamps
which were drawing scant warmth against the whistling cold.
Nothing has attached itself to the soil.
It is in the wind when words of men in well-tailored suits address the
town with wondrous words with the promise of prosperity.
It is in the looted coffers, having been cast out of pockets stuffed to bulging.
It keeps company in dusty streets where drunken men weave their
way out of lives of honorable trade and farming, to scrounge money
off the scales of distant cities, returning calloused and broken,
with nothing.